Improvement of LEACH for Fault-Tolerance in Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, failures occur due to energy depletion, environmental hazards, hardware failure, communication link errors, etc. These failures could prevent them to accomplish their tasks. Moreover, most routing protocols are designed for ideal environment such as LEACH. Hence, if nodes fail the performance of these protocols degrade. In this context, we propose two improved versions of LEACH so that it becomes a fault-tolerant protocol. In the first version, we propose a clustered architecture for LEACH in which there are two cluster-heads in each cluster: one is primary (CHp) and the other is secondary (CHs). In the second version, we propose to use the checkpoint technique. Finally, we conducted several simulations to illustrate the performance our contribution and compared obtained results to LEACH protocol in a realistic environment.